The need for website redesign or renewal comes in every two or three years with the changing trends in web design and the increasing demand of users for a better experience, website speed and performance. For businesses, this means constant efforts put in optimization and updates. 

The website renewal process might turn into both a chance to fix certain technical issues and a threat to cause new ones if done in the wrong way. Here is why careful planning of the process is essential for ending up with a website that offers a better look, functionalities, and speed. Here are the most important steps that you should never skip:

Redesign the User Experience

Now is the time to think about the users and plan for a whole new experience for them on your website. Starting from its technical performance to the design of the last call-to-action button everything should look and work great. When thinking about how you can improve your website pay attention to:

• Creating user-friendly design – on average, users spend around 3 seconds on a webpage before deciding whether to continue browsing a website. This means 3 seconds for you to prove that your site is easy to navigate on and the design attracts the attention of your users, clients, partners, or other website visitors. 
• Making the website responsive – this is not a recommendation. This is a must since more than half of the traffic will come from mobile devices. Make sure that you plan the redesign of your website in such a way to make it responsive for any kind of mobile and desktop device. 
• Creating and updating your content for your users – think about who they are and customize your content to respond to the needs of your own clients and partners. Do not try to flood your content with keywords because this will not boost your search engine ranking.

Consider Link Paths and Redirection

It is very likely that after the launch of your website you have added new pages, categories, and menus. Usually, such an update contradicts the initial plan for your website when you were looking at the big picture, but now you need to adapt new content to your old vision. This often leads to improper link paths or even broken links. The time to avoid issues like this one is when you plan for your website renewal. At this point, you can decide to change certain categories or menus of the website which requires a redirection of the old links. 

First of all, think of a link path that responds to your users’ needs and your business offering. An example of customer-oriented site could be the structure leading users in the following way: 

Homepage – Service offering – Additional information – Contact form

Simple, but effective. Try it and you will notice an increase in customer engagement and conversion rates.

The next step is the redirection of old and broken links to the new ones. Usually, you will need it when your page is moved to a new location, you are changing your domain name or you need to remove and delete a page. In such case, you will need to do the so called 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect leading users and search engines to a new URL address. It should be done in a specific way not to damage your user experience and the way your website is being indexed by search engines. Take a look at the complete 301 Redirects guide by SEMrush to learn when and how to use redirects for your website. 

Don’t Forget the SEO

Think about your SEO before your website renewal and this will save you time and efforts for optimization at a later stage. This is an ongoing process and at this point, you need to consider:

• How keywords have changed
• How competitors use keywords
• How search engine algorithms have changed and what they give most priority to

Have in mind that work on your SEO brings long-term results rather than a quick magical increase in your brand awareness, website visitors and conversions.  

Create a Sitemap 

Having gone through all the previous steps, the time comes to do the actual mapping of your website. You want to help Google navigate and find all new pages, don’t you? Then you need to plan and create a sitemap that will help your most important content get indexed on search engines. Without a sitemap, this will be nearly impossible to do and you will not be able to link your old content right on your updated website. 

It is extremely important sitemaps to be created for new websites, very big websites with many pages and sites with large archives. Let’s take a look at some of the best XML sitemap generator tools recommended by SEMrush that can ease the process for you:

• Slickplan – this is a visual type of sitemap generator tool that is highly customizable and allows users to work on the visual representation of the hierarchy of pages on their website. 
• Mindnode which is actually a mind mapping tool used to plan a project in a visual way. However, its functionalities allow for the visual planning of website sitemaps that could be exported in basic text formats and a PDF version. Mindnode is an app for Apple devices and has a free editor version. 
• XML-Sitemaps is a classic sitemap tool that comes with both free and paid versions with good SEO features included. The tool can also detect some broken links on your website so that you can fix them. XML-Sitemaps has also a mobile app.
• XML Sitemap Generators for WordPress – in the past these were always needed as additional plugins until version 5.5 of WordPress came with the XML sitemap function. However, you can still continue using the popular Google XML Sitemaps, Yoast SEO, or XML Sitemap Generator WordPress plugins to help you generate a sitemap for your website. 

Once you are done it is time to submit your sitemap. Google offers some great guidelines and opportunities to do it as easy as possible – link. 

You Are Not Done

Renewing your website is a never-ending process. Progress in web development, new trends in digital marketing, new business environment and the evolvement of industries will require constant changes updates. With new technologies, users will become more and more demanding and less likely to engage with a website that has a poor design, speed and functionalities. For you, this means keeping an eye on trends and being able to react on time. 

In 2021 we are facing a growing number of companies, even whole industries, adopting digital transformation strategies to optimize production, save costs, or simply to stay in business. Industry 4.0, IoT, and AI are not terms of the future anymore. Investments in Cloud, cyber security, and smart technologies are growing at faster pace than ever to bring maximum efficiency and productivity for tech companies, e-commerce businesses, factories, etc.

What does it mean for cloud and web hosting providers? It definitely means a growing market potential but more furious competition, as well. Aside from the recent-time consolidations, there are huge companies from many years on the market like OVH, Leaseweb, SiteGround, Digital Ocean, which are hard to compete with. And you have the hyperscalers – AWS, Google Cloud. So it is really hard to make a successful hosting/cloud business nowadays. In such an environment any provider must build a strong brand to support the marketing and selling of its service. Here are 6 proven tips that would help:

1. Strengthen Social Media Presence

Users have their own life on the Web far beyond being clients of your business. They spend time on browsing, learning, entertaining, and mainly on visiting social media. In fact, 50.1% of the time spent on mobile devices is done using social media apps, TechJury reports. And if you want to create a brand and build relations with your clients, you must be there. From one side, you should try to “steal” as much as possible from these 50.1 percent. On the other hand, you should be easy to connect with by existing and potential clients. 

Тhe latest statistics show that Facebook continues to be the winning social media platform with more than 2.8 billion active users. 

 The major and must have social media platforms for your business would be:

• Facebook (60% of all social media users are on Facebook)
• LinkedIn (55 job applications submitted per second!)
• Instagram (130 million monthly clicks on commercial posts)
• Twitter (63& of all users are aged between 35-65)

However, before spending time building a brand on any social media platform it is important to determine where our audience is being active.

Nice to have social media platforms:

• Youtube (also known as the second largest search engine after Google)
• Pinterest (⅓ of all users use it to follow companies)
• Snapchat (2nd most popular mobile app)
• TikTok (the average time spent per day on the app is 52 minutes)
• Reddit (50% of the users are from the U.S)

Source – https://tech.co/ 

Remember: Do not focus on selling on social media. People would not go on Instagram to buy web hosting and would hardly purchase cloud solutions “on a good deal” while watching Tik-Tok videos. Try to engage them, instead. Users visit social media mainly to read news, view photos, watch videos, entertain and network. Act as a human and show them your brand personality rather than your offers. Tell them what stands behind great web hosting solutions, present your team members, share your company culture, be fun and informative on industry-related topics and share your expertise. Then you will notice how users engage with your posts, get used to talking to you and when it comes to web hosting you will be the top-of-mind choice.  

Also remember: Although social media may be the best way to engage and communicate with customers, businesses should not fall into the trap of providing support through social media. They can use certain integrations, but the real support should come only through the dedicated ticket system. We would recommend you use social media tracking tools/brand mention monitoring tools.

2. Provide Excellent Customer Support and Quality Communication

It is all about acting professional when it comes to customer support and communication. If someone has chosen you, it means they trust you to be their business partner and to provide flawless hosting solution and professional service. In times when technological advance and equipment are just a temporary advantage, client experience is what will bring you long-term benefits and higher customer lifetime value. 

Remember: 24/7/365 customer support is not an extra anymore, when talking about hosting and cloud providers.Don’t forget that it is crucial to have your contact information well-positioned on your website for users to easily find it. expect support to be available at any time to make sure their websites, systems and web platforms are being taken care of and are online with no interruption. On top of this, you need to make sure that clients could reach up to you by multiple channels and could get expert and qualified care or consulting. Why is this important for your brand? Because happy clients recommend and talk about experience, but so do unhappy ones. And because word-of-mouth is much more powerful than your marketing and branding tools. 

3. Showcase Your Work and Successful Projects 

Clients would not trust promises, but results, instead. Your brand and hosting service will be much more credible if you share some of your past achievements and results. Users will see that you have a good offer on Cloud hosting or Web hosting and that you complement it with additional extras. But they will always doubt if you are ready to respond to their specific needs, business environment, clients or way of work. 

Remember: There is nothing more powerful that could turn a prospect into a lead than a case study or examples of real solutions to similar problems that they have. For example, if you know that many of your clients host e-commerce platforms, you could prepare a case study and target it to other e-commerce businesses as a proof of your experience. Display such examples on your website and share them on all your social media profiles and other channels. Promoting clients’ satisfaction and the quality of your services is crucial for your brand. After all they are your brand ambassadors and you should be able to utilize it and turn it into your favor.  

4. Make Your Website User-Friendly

Your website is the most important channel for your web hosting business. It is most likely that you clients would go there to check your hosting parameters, prices, solutions, features and equipment, and ultimately, to make a purchase. Your task is to ease the process by making your website user-friendly, simple to use and fast to load to provide exceptional customer journey. 

Remember: Focus on usability. Everything should be exactly where users expect it to be. Do not put too much for a fancy design which they do not understand. 

5. Focus on Website Content

If this is somehow important for your SEO, for your users it is crucial. Make sure to provide a good explanation of what you offer and avoid the trap of going too technical. You are speaking to people who want to know what you do, how much it costs and why they should trust you and not your competitors. The faster and easier you answer them, the better for your brand and business. 

Remember: Do not write for search engines. Write for people. Abundance of keywords in your texts would not put you among the top results on Google. Search engines algorithms are intelligent enough to judge if a user is interested in and engaged with what you show them. 

Even though it can be difficult in the beginning, if you would like to get in the game and make an impact for your business, we would recommend researching some of the most popular SEO tools and start using them.

• Google Search Console 
• Ahrefs
• Moz Pro
• Majestic
• SEMrush

SEO is critical to a brand’s web pages. After all, users trust the search engines. Aside from better visibility for your brand, you will be able to better understand the web environment and your competition.

6. Offer Predictable and Easy to Understand Pricing

It is not a one-time sale that you are chasing. Instead, you will be looking for loyal customers with high lifetime value. This goes through being very transparent and predictable on pricing your offerings. People should know why a web hosting plan has a given price and why adding more storage space could cost an additional amount of money. 

Remember: Being loyal and transparent doesn’t mean to stay with the same price for the same services forever. Instead try to upsell your clients with additional features and offerings that bring higher value for their business and end users. 

Do you still think that standing out from the crowd of hosting companies is “rocket science”? We believe it is just the opposite. By implementing these 6 simple steps you will for sure make a big step towards building a sustainable brand that will increase the value of your hosting and cloud solutions.